Race to the rock
“It’s safer, less painful and less soul destroying to remain a dot watcher.”
With those words for inspiration, this post takes dot watching several levels too far.
For an introduction to Race to the Rock perhaps read about the first 2016 ride. Race to the rock happened again in 2017 and 2018. There’s an active online community serving up a constant stream of visual inspiration. This post is a little different, but hopefully adds another tasty tidbit to the race-to-the-rock soup.
Each rider carries a live gps tracker that, in combination with map progress website, provides easily accessible ride data for each racer. (The full data for 2018 is available here). Some quick summary stats:
- The data set for the four finishers provided 10522 datapoints
- In 8.3% of those datapoints were stopped (or less than 0.5 km/hr)
What other insights can the dot watcher gain from playing with these data…
Distance
Speeds
Figure 1 shows the distribution of speed in km/hr between each pair of data points.
Figure 1: Distribution of speed
Mapping the speed by each data point results in Figure ??. The map is set to zoom on about Leigh Creek, but you can pan/zoom anywhere.
The following table shows the first few records for each rider. If the table options are hard to see, press the lightbulb at the top-right of the page to switch to ‘light’ mode.